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How the Internet Got Its Rules

The series of rules that loosely govern and develop the Internet began in 1969 as a student's memo, handwritten in the wee hours in a bathroom, about what might be done with these computer things now that they'd connected wires between four of them. What followed was a shining example of the innovative power of cooperation and open knowledge sharing - on "rough consensus and running code" - as opposed to the long-standing tradition of proprietary and patented knowledge.

TODAY is an important date in the history of the Internet: the 40thanniversary of what is known as the Request for Comments. Outside thetechnical community, not many people know about the R.F.C.'s, but thesehumble documents shape the Internet's inner workings and have played asignificant role in its success.

When the R.F.C.'s were born, there wasn't a World Wide Web. Even by the endof 1969, there was just a rudimentary network linking four computers at fourresearch centers: the University of California, Los Angeles; the StanfordResearch Institute; the University of California, Santa Barbara; and theUniversity of Utah in Salt Lake City. The government financed the networkand the hundred or fewer computer scientists who used it. It was such asmall community that we all got to know one another.

A great deal of deliberation and planning had gone into the network'sunderlying technology, but no one had given a lot of thought to what wewould actually do with it. So, in August 1968, a handful of graduatestudents and staff members from the four sites began meeting intermittently,in person, to try to figure it out. (I was lucky enough to be one of theU.C.L.A. students included in these wide-ranging discussions.) It wasn'tuntil the next spring that we realized we should start writing down ourthoughts. We thought maybe we'd put together a few temporary, informal memoson network protocols, the rules by which computers exchange information. Ioffered to organize our early notes.

What was supposed to be a simple chore turned out to be a nerve-rackingproject. Our intent was only to encourage others to chime in, but I worriedwe might sound as though we were making official decisions or assertingauthority. In my mind, I was inciting the wrath of some prestigiousprofessor at some phantom East Coast establishment. I was actually losingsleep over the whole thing, and when I finally tackled my first memo, whichdealt with basic communication between two computers, it was in the weehours of the morning. I had to work in a bathroom so as not to disturb thefriends I was staying with, who were all asleep.

Still fearful of sounding presumptuous, I labeled the note a "Request forComments." R.F.C. 1, written 40 years ago today, left many questionsunanswered, and soon became obsolete. But the R.F.C.'s themselves took rootand flourished. They became the formal method of publishing Internetprotocol standards, and today there are more than 5,000, all readilyavailable online.

But we started writing these notes before we had e-mail, or even before thenetwork was really working, so we wrote our visions for the future on paperand sent them around via the postal service. We'd mail each research groupone printout and they'd have to photocopy more themselves.

The early R.F.C.'s ranged from grand visions to mundane details, althoughthe latter quickly became the most common. Less important than the contentof those first documents was that they were available free of charge andanyone could write one. Instead of authority-based decision-making, werelied on a process we called "rough consensus and running code." Everyonewas welcome to propose ideas, and if enough people liked it and used it, thedesign became a standard.

After all, everyone understood there was a practical value in choosing to dothe same task in the same way. For example, if we wanted to move a file fromone machine to another, and if you were to design the process one way, and Iwas to design it another, then anyone who wanted to talk to both of us wouldhave to employ two distinct ways of doing the same thing. So there wasplenty of natural pressure to avoid such hassles. It probably helped that inthose days we avoided patents and other restrictions; without any financialincentive to control the protocols, it was much easier to reach agreement.

This was the ultimate in openness in technical design and that culture ofopen processes was essential in enabling the Internet to grow and evolve asspectacularly as it has. In fact, we probably wouldn't have the Web withoutit. When CERN physicists wanted to publish a lot of information in a waythat people could easily get to it and add to it, they simply built andtested their ideas. Because of the groundwork we'd laid in the R.F.C.'s,they did not have to ask permission, or make any changes to the coreoperations of the Internet. Others soon copied them - hundreds of thousandsof computer users, then hundreds of millions, creating and sharing contentand technology. That's the Web.

Put another way, we always tried to design each new protocol to be bothuseful in its own right and a building block available to others. We did notthink of protocols as finished products, and we deliberately exposed theinternal architecture to make it easy for others to gain a foothold. Thiswas the antithesis of the attitude of the old telephone networks, whichactively discouraged any additions or uses they had not sanctioned.

Of course, the process for both publishing ideas and for choosing standardseventually became more formal. Our loose, unnamed meetings grew larger andsemi-organized into what we called the Network Working Group. In the fourdecades since, that group evolved and transformed a couple of times and isnow the Internet Engineering Task Force. It has some hierarchy and formalitybut not much, and it remains free and accessible to anyone.

The R.F.C.'s have grown up, too. They really aren't requests for commentsanymore because they are published only after a lot of vetting. But theculture that was built up in the beginning has continued to play a strongrole in keeping things more open than they might have been. Ideas areaccepted and sorted on their merits, with as many ideas rejected by peers asare accepted.

As we rebuild our economy, I do hope we keep in mind the value of openness,especially in industries that have rarely had it. Whether it's in healthcare reform or energy innovation, the largest payoffs will come not fromwhat the stimulus package pays for directly, but from the huge vistas weopen up for others to explore.

I was reminded of the power and vitality of the R.F.C.'s when I made myfirst trip to Bangalore, India, 15 years ago. I was invited to give a talkat the Indian Institute of Science, and as part of the visit I wasintroduced to a student who had built a fairly complex software system.Impressed, I asked where he had learned to do so much. He simply said, "Idownloaded the R.F.C.'s and read them."

Stephen D. Crocker is the chief executive of a company that developsinformation-sharing technology.